The struggle of how to manage the solid waste produced in cities every day reflects much about the ways in which a city is administered and the extent to which it embraces the requirements of urban environmental sustainability. While often not as environmentally pressing as water access, disease, and extreme event hazards, for the past several decades urban solid waste management has been regularly described as a global crisis. Lack of strategies to effectively and safely handle solid waste, shortage of appropriate waste management sites and facilities, and absence of sufficient financing for these operations have severely hampered the ability of cities to address this crisis. The chapter examines a set of four cases detailing how and when, and under what circumstances did significant policy transition occur, and the extent to which these resulted in transformative shifts in city-level solid waste management. The cases include Buenos Aires, Argentina; Johannesburg, South Africa; Seattle, US; and Taipei, Taiwan. Solid waste management crises were present in each locale and were experienced as a set of policy proposals and failures before longer-term structural policy regime shifts are defined. Across all the cases, these solid waste management policy shifts were directly associated with an emergent reimagining of each city’s identity.